As is well known in the continuous business form art, there is a large variety of uses for label bearing continuous business forms. One particularly popular type of label bearing form includes one section which is provided with one or more pressure-sensitive adhesive backed labels and an adjacent section on which variable information may be printed and retained.
Of this general type, there are two differing constructions which are in use today. In one, a relatively wide ply is adhered to a relatively narrow ply by pressure-sensitive adhesive contained on the former. At least at the point of adhesion of the former to the latter, the narrow ply is coated with a waxy material so as to serve as a conventional release liner for the narrow ply, which in turn, defines a pressure-sensitive adhesive label section overlying the narrow ply.
The part of the wide ply that does not overlie the label section then serves as a record or message bearing portion of the business form.
One difficulty with this construction is that the wide ply serves as both the label section and the record or message bearing portion of the form which means that in those instances where it is desirable for any of a variety of reasons that the label be formed of a material or stock different than that used to form the record or message bearing portion, such a construction cannot be satisfactorily employed.
Another prior art construction, which is not subject to the foregoing difficulty, is one wherein conventional adhesive label stock is adhered to conventional business form or record keeping stock. To provide a record or message bearing portion for the business form, a longitudinal glue line is placed along one edge of the release liner on the side thereof opposite the label stock, and an elongated ply adhered to the combined release liner and label stock by such glue line.
In this construction, the added ply serves as the record or message bearing portion and obviously can be formed of any suitable or desired material, which can be quite different from that utilized in forming the release liner. However, in some sorts of processing equipment, this type of form can pose a difficulty because of the thickness of the form at the junction of the record or message bearing ply and the release liner. In particular, the thickness of the form at this location is equal to the sum of the thickness of the record or message bearing ply, the thickness of the release liner, the thickness of the label stock, the thickness of the pressure sensitive adhesive between the release liner and the label stock, and the thickness of the glue line adhering the release liner and the record or message bearing stock. This thickness adds rigidity to the form which may make processing on certain types of equipment difficult. In addition, in some cases, the thickness alone may tend to cause form components to hang up in certain types of printers or the like.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the above problems.